Low-wage imperialism & the potential for workers' struggle

Workers World Party Secretariat members Teresa Gutierrez and Fred Goldstein will present papers at the Fourth International Conference on the Work of Karl Marx and the Challenges of the 21st Century in Havana, Cuba, May 5-8. We publish below excerpts focusing on the U.S. working class from Goldstein’s paper. Both papers will soon be available on the workers.org site in their entirety.

This paper is being written at the beginning of a capitalist economic crisis. No one knows at this point how it will end up. But our thesis is not based upon this present crisis or any specific event. It is part of a broader view of the profound effects upon the working class of the restructuring of world capitalism that has been in progress for three decades but has accelerated in the last 15 years or more.

Extremely important for the working class is the change in the international economic division of labor that has emerged in the last several decades.

For the first time in the history of imperialism, workers in the rich, privileged countries, in one area after another, are being thrown into direct wage competition, job for job, with workers in the low-wage areas by the economic architects of world finance capital. Auto parts workers in Detroit compete with auto parts workers in Mexico. Customer service workers in Phoenix compete with customer service workers in the Philippines. Legal secretaries in New York compete with legal secretaries in Bangalore. The transnational corporations have created a worldwide wage competition and a race to the bottom.

Additionally, millions of immigrants from Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and the Middle East flood into the U.S. fleeing imperialist-imposed poverty and are subjected to low wages and extreme exploitation with few rights and protections. Immigration is an integral part of imperialist globalization and plays an essential part in the cultivation of wage competition among workers.

Marxism teaches that it is the development of the productive forces that not only creates new classes and destroys outmoded ones, but that under capitalism, which is compelled to constantly revolutionize the means of production, the character and relationships of existing classes constantly undergo transformation.

Since the dawn of capitalism, technological innovation has been aimed at increasing the productivity of labor, i.e., increasing the rate of exploitation of the workers. High-tech means relatively fewer workers producing more commodities in a given time at lower cost to the bosses. Bound up with this process is refinement of production to incorporate the skills of workers in machines and now embedded in software, robots, etc. The historic trend is to deskill the proletariat and thus lower their wages.

In the U.S. today there are millions of high-skilled workers whose skills are no longer needed by capital. Many have been laid off but many more come from the new generation of workers graduating from college or high school with skills and specialties which are not required by the low-wage economy. The service jobs that have absorbed the labor surplus in the U.S. are low-skilled and pay near poverty level wages. Whereas GM used to be the largest employer in the U.S., with 600,000 high-paying, secure union jobs, today Wal-Mart is the largest employer in the U.S., with 1.2 million workers with no unions who work for poverty wages.

This reduction of skilled jobs is adding to the worldwide wage competition and relentlessly leveling the standard of living downward in the imperialist countries and the U.S. especially. A new situation is threatening, the likes of which the workers have not experienced since the Great Depression.

Families have adjusted over the last three decades by working multiple jobs to supplement lost income. Workers have been forced to accept lower wages and the reduction or elimination of benefits; they have learned to live on less; they have submitted to harsh working conditions; they have relocated or traveled long distances to get jobs after having been laid off.

Workers have resorted to unprecedented amounts of credit and borrowing to keep their heads above water. The personal debt of the workers has been used to stave off personal crises, daily, weekly and monthly in millions of individual cases. Now it has transformed itself into a crisis of the class as a whole and is part of the general economic crisis of the system.

At this very moment millions of families are faced with the prospect of losing their homes. In the twenty years between 1984 and 2004 over 30 million workers lost permanent jobs in the U.S. Only two-thirds were able to find new jobs and two-thirds of them worked for less money, with fewer if any benefits. Insecurity is growing.

Meanwhile, the U.S. has the largest prison population in the world, disproportionately Black and Latin@, and it is growing every year. Repression, police brutality and racism are used to enforce increasing social inequality which keeps the wages and living conditions of African Americans, Latinas and Latinos, Asians and Native peoples, stuck at the bottom of the capitalist economic structure.

The sociological consequences of the high-tech, low-pay economy were pointed out by Sam Marcy in his 1985 book, “High Tech, Low Pay”:

“It is this highly significant shift from the higher paid to the lower paid which is dramatically changing the social composition of the working class, greatly increasing the importance of the so-called ethnic composition of the working class, that is, the number of Black, Latin, Asian, women and other oppressed groups, particularly the millions of undocumented workers.”

This development will bring the oppressed into the leadership of the class struggle and invest it with the energy and militancy that flows from combining the struggles against national oppression and class exploitation.

There are important revolutionary political conclusions to be drawn from these developments. There is a vast increase in the superexploited international working class in the oppressed countries. This rapidly growing proletariat is being organized by the penetration and growth of capitalism which lays the basis for future class struggles. In the previous period of imperialism the export of capital sustained class stability in the imperialist countries at the expense of the oppressed. In the present phase, the export of capital is being used by monopoly capital to undermine the economic position of all sectors of the working class. This is destroying the material basis of class collaboration in the labor movement and class peace.

The downward pressures will lead to a break up of the present stability and a revival of the struggle among the workers and the oppressed in the U.S. that will break through the surface of reactionary ideology and capitalist norms and lead to struggles not seen in the last 75 years. Intensified national oppression, including that of Indigenous peoples, and sexual and gender oppression, are all taking place in the framework of deepening class exploitation. This is bound to arouse resistance.

We have made this analysis not so we could sit by and wait for the revolution to come, but to use Marxism as it was meant to be used—as a guide to a revolutionary future. Our party is fighting with our limited resources to stimulate the struggle and to reach out to the masses in the early stages of the coming crisis.

We are struggling for international class solidarity with workers from India to Mexico who need jobs at good wages too. In the era of globalization this is the answer to worldwide wage competition. We are fighting in defense of immigrant workers, against racism, national oppression, and against sexual and gender oppression as the only road to class unity. On this basis we seek to unite with all anti-imperialist and communist forces in the current battle against capitalism and in the next phase of the struggle for world socialism.